Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to making your website easily accessible to search engines, and helping them understand and read the content so that they can rank it high up in their index.

SEO is a huge topic and I won’t go deep into it. This article is primarily targeted to people who own and operate a WordPress blog. Some of the tips mentioned are of course general SEO methods used on all kinds of sites. Other tips and tools focus on WordPress, which has become the preferred blogging tool in the past few years.

Let me know if I’ve missed something by adding your comments. These tips primarily focus on how to search engine optimize WordPress installations, as opposed to off-site SEO (getting and building backlinks).

SEO Factors

1. Title tag

Title tag or the article title is one of the most important SEO parameters. That is what appears as the title of the post in search engine result pages (SERPs) and hence you should make sure that it’s relevant, has keywords, is neither too long nor too short, and accurately conveys what the content is all about.

2. Meta description

The meta description for your blog or a blog post is a short description that appears below the content title in SERPs. If the description is precise and informative, a user is more likely to click on the post title and hence end up on your site.

3. Content

Content, obviously, is the heart and soul of SEO. Great content can attract attention and links, and hence search engines would prefer showcasing it too. Plus, it is what your readers would like to read, isn’t it?

4. Keywords

Having a general understanding of keywords (words, sentences, or phrases) relevant to the content on your site and how to use them properly always helps.

5. Web host

The web host is what your site calls home and where the Googlebot comes knocking on the door whenever you publish articles. Hence, be careful while choosing a host for your site.

6. Site loading speed

Site loading speed is something bloggers recently started focusing on when Google announced that it would be treated as one of the ranking factors. The faster your site loads, the better.

7. Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file on your server that tells search engine bots what to index and what to skip. It’s better to create one and place it in your root directory. Here’s a guide to create a simple robots.txt file.

8. Sitemaps

A sitemap is basically a list of pages or URLs that the search engine’s crawler can access. Ideally, you should have both XML and HTML sitemaps on your site. WordPress users can use Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create an XML one.

9. Permalinks

The default permalink structure in WordPress isn’t that good. You can customize permalinks according to your preferences and for better search engine optimization.

10. Headings and Post Slugs

Headings and sub-headings in an article are important for readers as well as for search engines. Use them wisely. Regarding post slugs, you should make them short and keyword-rich (don’t overdo it though).

How Much Should You Focus on Search Engine Optimizing?

If you are newbie when it comes to WordPress and SEO, you might find all this a bit overwhelming. Well, SEO is a time-consuming process so I won’t say that you could get it done quickly. But here’s the thing: Don’t consume your days tweaking your site just for the search engines. You should instead focus on producing great content and building relationships.

While SEO is important, it depends on the content and not vice-versa. If the content is good and you can promote it well, it will attract links automatically.

My Other articles on SEO:

1. http://arpitshah.com/top-5-seo-extensions-for-google-chrome/
2. http://arpitshah.com/buzzzy-com-search-engine-for-google-buzz/
3. http://arpitshah.com/all-in-one-seo-pack-vs-platinum-seo-pack-wordpress-plugins/

Read full article here.

We know you’re busy. Even with every social media, web, and RSS tool at your disposal, you can occasionally miss out on some of the week’s most insightful content.  

Never fear. I’ve taken a moment to round up the best WordPress resources from past 3 weeks and present them here for your enjoyment.

1) Top 10 WordPress Plugins For More Traffic – Blogging is a good way to share information. We desided to share some useful plugins for one of the best blog softwares these days.

2) Top 10 Latest Powerful WordPress Security Plugins and Tips & Tricks – After putting in all of the time, and perhaps money, into your WordPress website or blog, its now time to secure and protect it from outside enemies and general bad guys: hackers, spammers and all round tossers.

3) My Favorite Top 3 WordPress themes – There are more than 1100 themes available on WordPress Theme Directory. Out of them here are 3 my favorite themes.

4) Must have top 10 plugins for your WordPress blog – There’s good reason why WordPress is the most popular blogging platform. It’s easy to use and has tons of great features. But what’s really made this open source software excel is its passionate community. Yes, WordPress has lots of features built in, but it doesn’t have everything. The WordPress community fills this need. It’s full of talented developers that are constantly creating plugins to extend the features and make it even better.

5) Best top 5 WordPress Plugins for SEO – With WordPress SEO Plugins you can more optimize your blog for search engines, here is a list of BEST SEO WordPress plugins for year 2010.

6) Power of Social Bookmarking: 5 Best WP Plugins – Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

7) The Power of jQuery: 8 Wonderful WP Plugins – jQuery is ideal because it can create impressive animations and interactions while being simple to understand and easy to use. WordPress awesomeness lies in its fact that it can be customized to power any type of site you like! But what happens when you combine the power of jQuery with WordPress, the possibilities are infinite.

8 ) 5 best WordPress plugins to increase Adsense revenue – Most of the Webmaster depends on Google Adsense for revenue from their blogs/websites. Adding Google Adsense in WordPress Blog is little bit difficult. In order to help new Webmasters, I have collected some of the best Adsense WordPress Plugins those are available on WP Registry.

9) Top 5 WordPress BACKUP Plugins – Do you backup your blogs? If not, you should! All the efforts you put into writing, advertising, marketing and administrating your blog can go to waste if appropriate reservation measures are not taken in time. Even though many hosting companies make backups of your account, it is still a must to have your own ones. As you never know when a disastrous failure can take place, having several restoration points is reasonable.

10) Top 5 best Tracking Plugins for your wordpress blog – Stats Tracking is One Of The Most Addictive And Time Wasting Activities You, As A Blogger Can Participate In!

Dear Users,

I have just added Twitter’s Official Tweet Button Support in “Twitter Goodies” WordPress Plugin. Version 6.0.5 just released with these changes.

Change Log v6.0.5:

• Major Upgrade
• NEW: Official Twitter's Tweet Button Option added
• Options to display Button on Page, Front Page, RSS Feed
• Options to display Button before content, after content, manual
• Button Style Option => Vertical, Horizontal, No Count
• Float Left/Right Option
• More configuration options related to official Tweet Button

More Screenshots:

Download Link: http://arpitshah.com/plugins/twitter-goodies/

Update: Just added official Tweet Button to my blog.

Twitter is great for sharing interesting things you find on the web. In fact, close to a quarter of all Tweets include a link in them. Despite the high volume of sharing, there is plenty of room to make it easier. Copying and pasting, link shortening, and bouncing between browser tabs just to share a link in a Tweet is too much work.

Today we’re launching the Tweet Button to make sharing simple. It lets you share links directly from the page you’re on. When you click on the Tweet Button, a Tweet box will appear — pre-populated with a shortened link that points to the item that you’re sharing.

The Tweet Button is not only simple for users, but for publishers of all sizes, too. Recreational bloggers to large media companies can quickly and easily add the Tweet Button to their sites. It only takes a few lines of code. The Tweet Button will help publishers grow traffic and increase their Twitter following.

Starting today, the following sites will use the Tweet Button. All of them integrated this in less than one week.

• AddThis
• Arizona Republic/azcentral.com
• Ask.com
• CBS Interactive
• CNN.com
• Cracked.com
• Detroit Free Press
• eHow.com
• Eventbrite
• Gawker Media
• HuffingtonPost.com
• Hulu
• LIVESTRONG.com  and more…..

Read full story here: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/pushing-our-tweet-button.html